Thursday, April 21, 2016

I worked from home today so instead of taking my afternoon break in old industrial Long Island City I took my break in Central Park - stopping first to drop off my laundry and pick up a cappuccino and hamantash at the Gastronomie 491 the delightful bakery/cafe next to my laundry. I don't know why I took so long to discover this place - here I had been going to Starbucks since I moved in two months ago and meanwhile this great place was even closer than the two Starbucks on Columbus.

The crowded but fragrant Pinetum.

There seems to be quite a few French-type pastry places on the UWS, but then there seems to be quite a lot of French people up here too. Even with my half-assed French language skills I can sometimes understand what they're saying as they pass by me - for instance today a woman who was probably a nanny said to a little boy -

"Timmy, Qu'est-ce que tu fait? Arrêté."

(Timmy, what are you doing? Stop it.")

Of course the context helped a lot.

The park was looking good today, but so full of people. I mean this was three o'clock in the afternoon and there were people everywhere, including kids. Well I guess quite a few might have been tourists, but still.

So I had been hoping to sit at a picnic table in the Pinetum and check my work email but all the picnic tables were taken. And all the benches in the shade were taken too, but I finally got one, next to the people in the photo. But it smelled like pine trees so it was all worth it.

Then I headed up to Summit Rock, which, while not completely empty had fewer people than the Pinetum. I lounged around for quite a while, enjoying the sun and wondering if it would be worthwhile to do an NYCPlaywrights production of ten-minute plays in the amphitheater of Summit Rock. Probably in September, if I decide to do it.

My activities & interests

My anti-racist bona fides

Although I was smeared on Tumblr by infamous bully Mikki Kendall and identitarian extremist K. Tempest Bradford (and thanks to the cozy relationship between Tumblr and Google, the smears show up in my search results), in fact I have a long history of opposing racism, and the evidence for the past 10 years is on this blog. Unhinged extremists like Kendall and Bradford don't care to know anything about the strangers they randomly smear. That's why they and the people who promote them like Verso books are horrible and don't help solve the problem of racism in the United States.